Great dynasties of the world: The Bloomsbury group

Friday 9 September 2011 19.05 EDT
First published on Friday 9 September 2011 19.05 EDT

'Once more I cry aloud," writes Clive Bell at the end of his 1954 essay What was "Bloomsbury"?. "Who were the members of Bloomsbury? For what did they stand?" Good questions.

The Bloomsbury group was not exactly a group. Nor was it merely a clique. There was no clear set of members, and no manifesto. It was, according to FR Leavis, merely a sort of coterie – of an inferior kind. DH Lawrence famously described various individuals associated with the group as "little swarming selves". He imagined crushing them.

Leonard Woolf – a founding member – claimed that they were in fact "a largely imaginary group of persons with largely imaginary objects and characteristics". According to Frances Spalding, in her indispensable illustrated introductory guide, The Bloomsbury Group (2005), the term is merely a useful "collective title for a group of friends". Another way of looking at the Bloomsbury group is to see it as the coming together of two extraordinary families, the Stephens and the Stracheys, around whose effulgence a constellation of others gathered.

Leslie Stephen was a literary critic. His first wife, Harriet Marian, was the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. His second wife, Julia Prinsep Jackson, was the niece of the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. His father was a permanent undersecretary in the British colonial office. His brother was a judge. With Julia, Leslie Stephen had four children: Vanessa, Thoby, Adrian and Virginia. Julia Jackson died young, and when Leslie Stephen died in 1904 the siblings moved to 46 Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury, London, where they began to receive guests "at home".

Some of those guests included the friends that Thoby Stephen had made when he was at Cambridge. One of these friends was Lytton Strachey. While the Stephens were solid members of the Victorian upper middle-class, the Stracheys were eccentric adventurers. Jane Strachey, the matriarch, was a pioneering feminist. Her husband, Richard, was an engineer and administrator in India. Among their 10 children were Pernel, who became principal of Newnham College, Cambridge; Pippa, a leading suffragist; Oliver, a cryptographer; and James, the psychoanalyst, and editor and translator of the 24-volume Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.

Lytton Strachey's friends and associates included Leonard Woolf, EM Forster, John Maynard Keynes, the writer Clive Bell, the painter Roger Fry, and the critic Desmond MacCarthy. They too became drawn into the Bloomsbury set. Thoby Stephen died of typhoid fever in 1906, but by then many of the important alliances between friends and families had been established. In 1907, Vanessa Stephen married Clive Bell, with whom she had two sons. In 1912, Leonard Woolf married Virginia Stephen, at Lytton Strachey's urging; Strachey had already proposed to Virginia himself, before quickly realising his mistake. "I think there's no doubt whatever that you ought to marry her," he wrote to Leonard. "You would be great enough, and you'd have the advantage of physical desire."

The plots thickened. The roots became ever more tangled. Vanessa had an affair with Duncan Grant, who was Lytton Strachey's cousin, and with whom she had a child. Lytton Strachey was also in love with Duncan, though he lived in a menage a trois with the painter Dora Carrington and their friend Ralph Partridge. Virginia enjoyed a famous affair with Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson. Somehow, the whole thing hung together. Bloomsbury, according to Virginia, consisted of a group of friends who shared an outlook on life that "keeps them dining together, and staying together, after 20 years; and no amount of quarrelling or success, or failure has altered this."

There are other members of the Bloomsbury group, too many to mention. Virginia Nicholson's Among the Bohemians (2002) is a good place to start, but there is probably nowhere to finish.